Potter: Remembering Oct. 22, 2014: Smugness will do Canada no good come the next terror attack

Ottawa Police and RCMP remove a member of the military from an exit behind the Canada Post building on Sparks street Wednesday October 22, 2014. ( Ashley Fraser / Ottawa Citizen )Ashley Fraser / Ottawa Citizen

It was two years ago today that Michael Zehaf-Bibeau drove up to the National War Memorial, hopped out, then ran over and shot ceremonial guardsman Cpl. Nathan Cirillo in the back. Zehaf-Bibeau then stormed Parliament Hill, and died cowering behind a pillar in Centre Block.

Shocking as the attack was, it would be a stretch to say that anyone in the parliamentary precinct was all that surprised. Just one month earlier, a spokesman for ISIL named Abu Muhammad Al-Adnani had called on its supporters to target Canadian civilians, along with Americans, Australians, French and other members of the U.S.-led alliance that was forming to defeat the radical Islamist group.

Since Zehaf-Bibeau’s mad dash came only two days after Martin Couture-Rouleau rammed his car into two members of the Canadian military in the parking lot, killing Warrant Officer Patrice Vincent, it was hard not to conclude that some sort of organized, ISIL-inspired terrorist plot was underway. But when the dust settled, it was clear there was no real connection between the two killings. Perhaps they were both vaguely inspired by ISIL’s call to action. We still have no idea how Zehaf-Bibeau became radicalized, and what finally motivated him to act.

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That winter the authorities successfully disrupted a “terror cluster” in Ottawa, while this past August an ISIL sympathizer named Aaron Driver was killed by the RCMP in Strathroy, Ont., while on the verge of committing a terrorist act. But, truth be told, over the past two years there has been very little to indicate that there is any sustained or growing terrorist threat in Canada. What little there is tends to be of the lone-wolf variety: one-off attempts by social outcasts who have latched onto a pidgin Islam as a vehicle for their alienation.

This is just a narrow instance of a more general and unique phenomenon, which is coming to be described as “Canadian Exceptionalism”: We have created a successful society with a robust welfare state, in a multicultural high-immigrant context, with virtually no significant backlash amongst anti-immigrant nativists. No Brexit or Trumpism or National Front for us.

The big question is, are we lucky or are we good? That is, is the relative peace in the nation a matter of history or geography or other circumstance, or is it because there is something special in our policies, institutions, or national identity and character. If it’s the former, how can we avoid squandering this luck? If it’s the latter, how can we identify what we are doing well, and reinforce and maybe even export that success?

These are important questions, and if we don’t spend a bit of time trying to answer them we could find ourselves stumbling into a national crisis over immigration, for two reasons.

The first is that we’re bringing a lot of new people to this country, and the government wants to bring in a lot more. More than 320,000 immigrants landed on our shores last year, up by more than a third from the year before. By some estimates, it is the largest increase in more than a century, and Immigration Minister John McCallum has said he wants to push that number even higher. Just how high depends on what’s in his three-year immigration plan, due to be released this fall, though McCallum did pour cold water this week on a business-group proposal to raise the annual target to 450,000 newcomers.

The second reason is more sobering: Eventually the law of large numbers is going to bite, and there’s going to be a successful large-scale terrorist attack on Canadian soil. Maybe it will be a lone-wolf with an assault rifle the authorities missed, or a group of wannabe jihadis who managed to make some pressure cooker bombs without blowing their own thumbs off. How we react will be an enormous test of our national character and our faith in our security services, our political leadership, our institutions and our very identity as Canadians.

There is certainly room for optimism. The takedown of Aaron Driver in the summer didn’t spark any noticeable anti-Muslim backlash. Despite the flood of immigrants, including 30,000 Syrian refugees, there continues to be widespread confidence in our brand of multiculturalism.

But what if Driver had managed to pull off a successful attack causing multiple casualties? Or what if, instead of being a Canadian-born convert to Islam, he had been a refugee whose radical tendencies were missed by the screening process? It would be naive to imagine that there wouldn’t be a rise in support for a Conservative leadership candidate with policies even more nativist than those Kellie Leitch has been peddling.

The flip side of the simple fact of Canadian Exceptionalism is a foggy-headed smugness about how things have worked out here. It’s easy to think there’s just something in the water that makes everyone seem to get along. Nothing captures this smugness better than the message Trudeau wrote in the guest book at the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum during a visit last summer. “Tolerance is never sufficient,” he wrote. “Humanity must learn to love our differences.”

Only someone caught in the grip of a theory of Canada’s undiluted moral goodness could write that without irony. Canada’s capacity to absorb large numbers of newcomers is probably higher than that of most countries, but it isn’t limitless. More to the point, our tolerance for diversity is just that — tolerance — and it probably wouldn’t take much in the way of bad immigrant behaviour to spark a nativist reaction.

Canada is a good country, but it is also very lucky, and we have a tendency to confuse our good luck with moral superiority. It’s a bit worrisome that when it comes to that confusion, our political leadership is no exception.

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Andrew Potter is the Director of the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada

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